The Role of a Technical Program Manager

A deep dive into Technical Program Manager Role - 🎁 Includes hiring templates!

At the beginning of my career, in the late '90s, unless you were working for major tech companies, projects were simple enough that everything could be managed between three main areas:

• Product: defining requirements, understanding the market, and providing direction on what to build.

• Design: materially designing the product based on Product Management's directives.

• Engineering: handling all technical aspects and the development.

If projects were too large, you could add one or more Project Managers, but most of the time, these three units alone were sufficient to deliver in mid-sized contexts.

Today, the situation isn't much different; we still rely on these three main units and on project managers when it comes to building tech projects.

However, one thing has changed: complexity.

A couple of decades ago, the majority of tech projects were focused around web apps. Today, there's much more technology involved, such as cloud computing, containers, microservice architectures, mobile platforms, and AI, just to name a few.

This often means managing multiple large projects with multidisciplinary teams, and sometimes having good EMs, product-minded engineers, tech proficient product managers and competent Project Managers is not enough.

That's where the role of a Technical Program Manager can become invaluable.

But what is this role about? What are their duties and responsibilities? And more importantly, do you really need a TPM, and if so, how do you recruit one?

These are the questions I'll try to answer in today's newsletter.

So let's dive in!

🛠️ What is a Technical Program Manager?

If you asked me this question a couple of years ago, I’m honest, I would have struggled to answer.

I’ve always seen the TPM role as something a bit corporate and I didn’t know well this role, until I needed one in my department.

So what is a TPM?